A really bad day to be a lobster in Florida Keys and along state’s east coast

Florida’s lobster season opened Tuesday, and thousands of divers and snorkelers were in the water, grabbing bugs in the Keys and along the state’s east coast.

Brent Argabright, owner of Dean’s Dive Center in Fort Myers, opened the season with his family at Deerfield Beach.

“We had a great time,” he said. “We made a couple of dives in 35 feet and got 12 lobsters easy. We weren’t even looking hard.”

Lobster season, which runs through March 31, is a big deal: About 150,000 recreational fishermen, 400 commercial divers and 800 commercial trappers target lobster in Florida.

In recent years, recreational fishermen have harvested 1.3 million pounds of lobster per year, while commercial fishermen have averaged 4.4 million pounds.

“We’ve got packed boats, and everybody’s happy,” said Duke Brack, a dive instructor at Key Dives in Islamorada. “You always have people who are learning to lobster and don’t limit out, and you have people who have been doing it for years and limit out in 10 minutes.”

Lobsters in the Keys and along the east coast arrive as larvae from the Caribbean.

Scientists actually conduct research to predict whether a given season will produce a good crop of lobsters, said Tom Matthews, an associate research scientist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

“But we’re not very good at it,” he said. “We’ve been doing a program since 1986, catching larval lobsters, which are the size of your finger nail, and we see no relationship between how many baby lobsters come in and how many are caught two years later.”

According to a 2009 study co-authored by Matthews, legal-sized lobsters (3-inch carapace) throughout the Keys and Dry Tortugas are predominantly 1 to 2 years old, and most lobsters harvested in those areas are just a few millimeters larger than the minimum legal size.

Commercial and recreational landings, which are important indicators of the lobster population, have been down in Florida by about 30 percent since the 2000-01 season.